Industry increasingly depends upon highly automated data acquisition and control systems to ensure that industrial processes/operations run efficiently, safely and reliably while lowering overall costs. In such systems, data acquisition begins with sensors measuring current values/status of process variables representing the status/operation of an industrial process or operation. The measurements are communicated to programmed controllers and data collection/management systems. The data collection/management systems, generally including process databases and data processing routines, manage and maintain the measurement data. Such data management and maintenance includes further processing the data (e.g., filtering), storing the data, and distributing the data to a variety of client applications. Such client applications include both automated and manual supervisory control processes and display/monitor user interfaces.
Industrial process/operation measurements come in a wide variety of forms and are used by industrial process control systems to regulate a variety of operations, both with respect to continuous and discrete manufacturing processes. By way of example the measurements produced by sensors include: a temperature, a pressure, a pH, a mass/volume flow of material, a quantity of bottles filled per hour, a tallied inventory of packages waiting in a shipping line, or a photograph of a room in a factory. Often, sophisticated automated process management and control hardware/software examine acquired process/operation measurement data, and respond by sending messages/signals to actuators/controllers that adjust the operation of at least a portion of the industrial process. The data produced by the sensors is also provided to human-machine interface (HMI) applications. The HMI applications support a variety of views that enable an operator to perform a number of supervisory tasks including: tailor the process (e.g., specify new set points) in response to varying external conditions (including costs of raw materials), detect an inefficient/non-optimal operating condition and/or impending equipment failure (alarm), and take remedial actions such as shut down a process or move equipment into and out of service as required.
System management application components execute in a supervisory role in process control systems to monitor operational status and overall health of the portions of a process control system that are responsible for acquiring process status information and applying decisions to the devices that control the processes. The system management components are basically responsible for monitoring and controlling the equipment/devices that control the process itself. In this role, the system management application components receive a variety of status data regarding the health and performance of process control system equipment including, for example: control processors, network switches, fieldbus modules, field devices connected to a process control network. The system management application components are also capable of taking actions, based upon the equipment status information, to alter the operation of system equipment. Such actions include: inhibiting/enabling alarms, checkpointing, rebooting, enabling/disabling upload, enabling/disabling download, enabling/disabling reports, going online/offline, running diagnostics, calibrating,
Vast quantities of various types of information are received by the system management application components. Some of the information is received and acted upon automatically by programmed system management components without user intervention/knowledge. However, other information is acquired and organized for display by a user interface subsystem on a graphical user interface (GUI) at a monitor station. Generally, increasing the types of information that can be presented to a human user improves the ability of the user to make decisions regarding the operation of the process control system equipment. However, when very large quantities of information of many types are involved, such information diminishes in value as the information becomes less accessible. It is therefore desirable to present system management information via a user interface in a manner that enhances its ability to be located and understood by users.